Menu

Subscribe

Productivity Stack - July 2020

I've recently made big strides on a few fronts when it comes to my productivity, focus, and wellness. I've been sharing with some folks lately, and I felt that writing a post would be the best way to convey these improvements.

Why the changes?

When I left my job and life in San Francisco, in January 2018, there were some changes I wanted to make. I'm talking specific, and conscious changes.

I talked about many of these here.

The simple way to put it is that I wanted a better life. Both in terms of direction, and daily experience.

There were also latent desires I had that were under the surface. The kind that sometimes bubble up to a life to do list when I'd write them, but the kind I had never actually stuck with for a significant period of time. For most people, this list, and feeling, is one they're intimately familiar with.

Here were mine:

  • Workout regularly
  • Eat more healthy food
  • Meditate daily

The more time I spent on writing the list, the more it went from specific plans, to aspirational 'perfect version of me', to 'the perfect person of all time' territory. As in, not practically achievable, at least, not in a 'I'll get started on this today' kind of way.

Naked in a Toyama onsen

Flash forward to 2019. I had by this stage launched my SEO consultancy, and achieved more than the benchmark I set for myself (ie. enough to live off of street food while living in Thailand). I was also living my goal life of being able to travel to, and live in, whatever country I liked. Thailand, Colombia, Georgia had been 2018.

In the Sydney summer I had met a girl I was into, and she was visiting her home town in Toyama Japan during Golden Week in 2019. So I joined her for that. I rented a room in a hotel that had an onsen in the basement.

One day, I was in the onsen and I looked in the mirror. I noticed I had a micro, barely-noticeable to anyone else, gut. I cannot overstate how impactful that sight was for me.

I've been skinny as a rake and eating whatever I please (although thanks to a wise mother, I tend to eat healthily) my whole life. This was new. Alarm bells went off. Part of my identity was being accosted.

50 floors up in Manila

A few months later I was living in the Philippines. I could afford to remove all the time vampires from my life, like cooking, cleaning, and commuting.

My micro-gut was still there. I thought about it. Here's what occurred to me:

  • I wanted to have more energy.
  • I wanted to look good naked.
  • I'd never been muscular, I wanted to be, at least once in my life.

One day, if I'm lucky, I'll be an old man. Of the life experiences I want to look back on, being muscular is one of them. I want a photo I can show the grandkids to say "see, I was a fit young man at one point in my day" with a twinkle in my eye.

If you think about the large categories of your life, then I believe a life well lived is one where you do something difficult and meaningful in each category. Think about these categories:

  • Love
  • Work
  • Family
  • Spiritual
  • Physical

There are likely more categories. If you focus, you can nail one, but true greatness means you address each of them and ask yourself - what would I do here if courage were not the issue?

For love, it might be putting yourself out there to meet, and be rejected by, more women. Only concerning yourself with progress towards what you want, rather than minimizing what you don't want (rejection). This takes real discomfort and courage (to be vulnerable, in essence).

For the physical it could be many things. For me it meant lifting weights. This also seemed the best foundation to begin with, even if I decided some other physical challenge was more to my liking.

The dominating question that entered my mind was simple:

If not now, when?

I had the means, the time, the freedom. What could be more important than prioritizing health anyhow? It's as existential a priority as one can have.

What does any of this have to do with productivity?

The weights are what started this.

On the 1st of August, 2019, I did my first weight training. As I come up on my one year anniversary I've done... 225 workouts where I've lifted weights (around 4.5 per week).

Tackling this one major item was the mindshift and foundation for my other changes. Here are those changes:

  • Going from 66kg to 81kg. Primarily lean muscle mass.
  • Improving my nutrition dramatically.
  • Daily meditation habit.
  • Went from being highly distracted by YouTube, News, and Social Media, to essentially eliminating these from my life.
  • A morning routine I stick to.
  • A night routine I mostly stick to.
  • Flossing every day.

My Productivity Stack

I won't go into each habit above. Instead, I'll explain my current productivity stack, and a couple of ideas that were highly impactful to my thinking (and without which, it's unclear if the tactical elements would have worked as well as they did).

Practical

  1. The Daily Scorecard.
  2. My Daily Meditation Habit.
  3. Make a list of what I'll do tomorrow (helps end the day and makes me feel calm and in control when I go to bed).

Here's why my daily scorecard looks like:

You'll notice I've mixed in easy items with harder ones. Momentum and easy wins are essential to maintaining strong habits if you're using this path.

I'll probably add some analysis soon, to see if I'm trending upwards like I feel I am.

It might seem odd to call meditation "practical". For me, it has been.

My most frustrating bad habit has been my propensity to go down YouTube rabbitholes. I'd cut out news quickly, once I decided to by using a Chrome extension (whose name I've deliberately forgotten) that redirects me from the sites I used to go to and instead sends me to a private blog post I wrote to myself about focusing on building what I want from life.

I also used muting on Twitter, muting on Instagram, and Newsfeed Eradicator on Google Chrome to eliminate most social media. Although lately I found myself spending too long on TikTok after waking up.

Still, the most powerless I felt was in my ability to ignore YouTube as much as I wanted. Sure, this wasn't crazy compared to other folks addictions, but it was in the 10-20 hours a week range and was preventing me from doing deep, focused work.

I used some Chrome plugins to remove suggested videos from YouTube, and that helped. I was quasi-bragging about this success in a group Messenger chat I have with other entrepreneur friends of mine.

I was a bit surprised. I had more expected folks to praise 'my' innovative approach. I felt I was bringing the knowledge. My next thought was that if what worked for my friend also worked for me, then it would be a gamechanger.

I followed up to ask how they meditated (Headspace) then downloaded the app, and the next day I did my first meditation. I began with 10 mins a day, now I do 20 mins a day.

How long did it take?

The results were instant. I started 4-5 weeks ago. I haven't been distracted by YouTube in that time. I've only watch clips on it on the weekend in deliberate downtime, and that was just once.

YMMV, and maybe this wouldn't have worked so well if I hadn't gone through the journey beforehand, but whatever it is, I'll take it.

Mental shifts

Here are some concepts that have been impactful for me, and ones I keep reminding myself of:

Get the systems right.

Get the foundation right.

These are: sleep, food, and exercise. If you're a human, then these are the bedrock of everything you do. The ROI and importance of getting these right are beyond question.

So just get them handled. Period. You can add anything else health-related to this list as well (like quitting smoking, reducing alcohol, etc). If you don't have these handled then guess what: you now have one job.

Make tomorrow better than today, that's all.

It's better to make small changes over time that you lock in as habits, then to push too hard and attempt something unsustainable. If you think of compound interest as making tomorrow better than today, then you'll get the idea.

Think in days and years, not months and weeks.

That means, have a long term vision, have a plan that maps back to today, and then only think about today and the vision.

How do you become a master sushi chef? Know that it will take 20 years, and then have ruthless focus on the specifics of what you're doing right now. The stuff in the middle takes care of itself.

Yes, you do want to revaluate from time to time and have intermediate goals, but these are overrated by most people.

It's an experiment that's never finished.

"Done" doesn't exist. You will always have to perform in sub-optimal circumstances. The right time is almost always now. This is a little paradoxical.

On the one hand, think long term, and know you'll perform better when you have improved your life. At the same time, this is no excuse to avoid doing things that are uncomfortable and require courage.

Expect fast results, wait forever. Commit to long term, and the results come quickly

Once you truly commit without expecting 'overnight' improvements (ie, once the dopamine spike of feeling good about making changes wears off) you'll be surprised how quickly time passes.

The time is going to pass anyway.

I got this one from Chris Pratt. He was talking about his own body transformation. One thing he said was that he realized that even though it would take 8 months to transform his body, he also realized that that time would pass anyway, so where did he prefer to be in 8 months? Still flabby, or ripped?

It feels like an almost trivial statement, but it got through to me. It's not about giving 8 months that you now no longer have. You will always have that time, so it's a question of what you wish to be true at the end of that time?

Other Improvements

Finally, here's a list of other improvements I've made, in no particular order:

  • Recorded my weight almost every day for several months.
  • Brush twice a day.
  • Floss once a day.
  • Get out of bed within 15 mins.
  • Make my bed every day.
  • [Sleep Improvement] No screens after 9pm.
  • [Sleep Improvement] Got a cheap but good blackout curtain solution.
  • [Sleep Improvement] Activated night mode on my PC and my phone.
  • [Sleep Improvement] Massively dialled in regular sleep and wake times.
  • Hired a dietician
  • Recorded everything I've eaten over the past two months (and used this info to improve)
  • Stopped watching porn.
  • No longer need afternoon naps (very rarely).